The dramatic globalization of the world's wine markets over the past two or three decades (see Anderson 2004) has generated countless new wine consumers. This has added to both the opportunities and competitive challenges for producers seeking to differentiate their product to attract the attention of consumers. Consumers in turn are always looking for new types of wines, and more so as wines within at least the lower-priced product ranges become more homogeneous with multinationalization of both wineries and wine retailers.

One strategy for producers has been to display grape varietal names on wine bottle labels. Its success, especially for lower-priced New World wines, has led to demands in the European Union for freeing up labelling laws so as to allow such labelling there also. Meanwhile, producers in the New World are increasingly realizing the marketing value of going beyond country of origin to regional (and even single-vineyard) labelling as another form of product differentiation – something that has long been practiced by Europe's traditional producers.

In addition to striving to differentiate their product, producers are also well aware of the impact climate changes (higher temperatures, more extreme weather events) are having on their winegrapes. Adaptation strategies include switching to warmer-climate or more-resilient grape varieties, and re-locating to a higher latitude or altitude to retain the current mix of grape varieties.

A blog post by Michael Duffy from May 2011, titled ‘Is Adelaide Our Cruellest City?’, begins:

There are plenty of examples of books and films trading on this reputation, one of the most notable recent examples being the 2011 film Snowtown, which dramatises the gruesome series of murders committed in and around Adelaide in the 1990s by John Bunting and his associates. Susan Mitchell's book about these murders, All Things Bright and Beautiful (2005), emphasised the creepy quality she projected onto the northern suburbs where most of the so-called Snowtown murders took place and where Bunting lived.

It ought to be impossible to talk about literary Adelaide without due mention of Geoffrey Dutton (1922–98). As a prime mover of Writers’ Week and the Adelaide Festival of Arts, and founding co-editor of Australian Letters (1957–68) and Australian Book Review (1961-), both magazines based in Adelaide, Dutton was central to the city's post-war cultural initiatives. He was associated with the University of Adelaide, where he studied for a year before enlisting (another magazine, Angry Penguins, appeared controversially there that same year, 1940) and later taught. He was one of the English Department's lively cohort of writers and scholars who were enthusiastic about Australian and other ‘new’ literatures.

From Adelaide, Dutton played important national roles too, as editor at the newly formed Penguin Australia, co-founder of Sun Books, publisher at Macmillan and editor of the Bulletin's literary supplement. He served on influential committees and boards, including the Commonwealth Literary Fund and the inaugural Australia Council. Dutton was a bold and astute editor, as shown in the commemorative volume he co-edited with his Adelaide friend and colleague Max Harris to showcase the achievements of Australian Letters. That book, The Vital Decade: Ten years of Australian art and letters (Sun Books, 1968), includes pairings of work by leading artists and poets of the day, Sidney Nolan with Randolph Stow, for example, and Clifton Pugh with Judith Wright. It also includes the famous piece Patrick White wrote for the magazine, ‘The Prodigal Son’, one of the best of all Australian essays.

The city of Adelaide existed extensively in writing before one house had been built, before one street had been surveyed, before the place had been named or its site determined. It was built on acts of writing, and it had existed in writing, a city built of paper and parchment, for years before it became a physical fact. The city itself, with its geometric streets and quarried stone, seemed to be somehow absent from all the documents surrounding its establishment, as though it were the hole in the middle of a large discursive doughnut.

That might be understandable, given that the focus was on establishing the laws and limits of the colony, rather than on the city itself. But throughout the history of South Australian writing there seems to be surprisingly little emphasis on, or representation of, the city of Adelaide itself. South Australia has writers associated with Mt Gambier, Auburn, Penola and Eudunda; it has writers who write about China and Russia; it even has writers who write space operas. But by comparison with Brisbane or Perth or Hobart, much less with Melbourne and Sydney, there is relatively little writing grounded in the city of Adelaide, at least not in a way that brings it to life after the fashion of Patrick White's Sydney or Helen Garner's Melbourne or David Malouf's Brisbane.

In the many historical accounts, certain key documents are repeatedly mentioned as crucial points in the establishment of the colony of South Australia and the city of Adelaide.

‘One is inclined’, Patrick White once wrote to his publisher in England, and by ‘one’ he meant himself, ‘to think of the Adelaideans as being advanced because of a handful of progressive individuals one knows.’ Among the 1960s progressives he had in mind were Harry Medlin and Max Harris, and Geoffrey Dutton who had been carving a niche for Australian literature in the University of Adelaide's English Department. These Adelaide rebels, realising early what White had to offer, faced down conservative resistance to The Ham Funeral, The Season at Sarsaparilla, and Night on Bald Mountain, and got them successively premiered there in 1961, 1962 and 1964. Thus White, who would come to represent Australian literature to the world, appropriately took centre stage at the Union Theatre in the University of Adelaide, not in one of the venues of the Adelaide Festival, which had rejected him. Later, in a more favourable climate of opinion, Jim Sharman commissioned Signal Driver for the 1982 Adelaide Festival, and included the opera Voss in the program as well. Premieres in Adelaide followed for two less well-known White plays, Netherwood in 1983 and Shepherd on the Rocks in 1987. White enjoyed Adelaide, not only the theatre but also the dry air that was good for his asthma, the Central Market where he could buy better wurst, cheeses, herbs, fresh fruit and vegetables than in Sydney, and an atmosphere that he found ‘peaceful and civilised’ (Marr 15–17).

I owe the title of this chapter to that distinctively South Australian historian John Hirst, whose 1973 study of the changing social and political relationship between ‘Adelaide and the country’ from the 1870s to 1917 is one of the classics of South Australian history. In what follows, I will be concerned mainly with what literary historian Geoffrey Dutton once dubbed ‘the mechanics of literature’ (Snow on the Saltbush, part 3), and with some relevant regional writings, relevant that is to the emergence of ‘literary Adelaide’. The chapter deals predominantly with the first half of the twentieth century, before the 1960s. It comes in three parts, ‘the country’, ‘the city’ and ‘the country and the city’. It will aim to show that by the 1960s, there was a self-sustaining ‘literary Adelaide’, though the literary culture was rather more closely tied to the countryside than was the case elsewhere in Australia then and rather more aware of its links to the first peoples.

My father was a farmer. Unlike many, maybe most, farmers, he read books. Unfortunately, my recall of the many titles that came into the house in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when I left for Adelaide, is limited. But I do remember some favourite authors: Australians Ion Idriess and F.J. Thwaites, and Nicholas Monsarrat and Elizabeth Goudge, both British writers, as well as the controversial Howard Spring.

John Roe's farm was on lower Eyre Peninsula.

One hundred and fifty years ago, a popular author with the mythological pseudonym ‘A. Pendragon’ walked the streets of central Adelaide, but his significance and his story—a complex drama of one man's efforts to establish himself as a colonial writer—have been long forgotten. In 1858, George Isaacs made his mark on Australian literature as the author of the first novel published in South Australia, The Queen of the South. Yet in terms of literary output, his most prolific years were in Adelaide during the 1860s, when newspapers, poems, stories and plays flowed from his pen. At the start of that decade he had modestly declared: ‘I believe there is a vacant place in our colonial literature. It is my aim to fill it’ (Pendragon, Number One, 3). This chapter examines Isaacs's efforts to achieve that goal in an unsupportive environment, and the huge personal cost that it entailed.

Born in London in 1825, Isaacs was the eldest son in a prosperous Jewish family. During his youth he dabbled in literature, hobnobbed with the titled, was a flâneur in Paris, collected medieval antiques and, despite his tender years, became a precocious antiquarian. This pleasant existence ended suddenly with the pregnancy of Marion, his non-Jewish partner, who was probably only 15 years old. Isaacs sold off his treasures, farewelled his friends, indicated he was leaving for a healthier climate and boarded the former convict ship, the Mountstuart Elphinstone. The couple and their baby arrived in Port Adelaide in March 1851.

When I came up for air after my first reading binge — which lasted about a year — I found myself dazed and confused. Oh, and married. The first year of my PhD was a mixed blur of dark and troubling reading and happy and frothy wedding plans. We'd finally decided to get married (after nine years of couplehood), partly because of my mother. During my Honours year she got sick. It all began with the flu; we all had it and it was a bad one, bad enough to trigger other disorders. My partner Ben ended up allergic to foods he'd never been allergic to before. Mum was the last to have it and when the flu went away she was a bit weak. We did yoga together twice a week and over the course of the year she grew weaker, until she could barely climb the stairs to the yoga studio, let alone do downward dog. Before the flu she'd been more flexible than I was; now she was unsteady on her feet. She had a couple of falls and she found she couldn't get up without assistance. By December she could barely walk.

Mum hates doctors and, typically, we couldn't drag her to one until her situation was acute. We knew by the GP's expression that things were bad, and when she ordered an immediate MRI we knew it was worse than bad. The worst thing was seeing Mum's fear.

Amy the optimist meets magical possibilities

I can be a bit thick at times. As I sorted through books, deciding what to write on for my exegesis, I realised exactly how thick I was being. I was making lists of what I'd read, sorting titles into groups, when it struck me that my problem was Realism. Somehow I'd bogged myself down in Realism. It was because of my slavish need for historical veracity, I suppose, but somehow I'd forgotten that fiction isn't reality. As I stared at the list I saw stories that employed the forms of fable, folk tale and fairytale; I saw flickers of magic realism; I saw hauntings; I saw Death embodied as a character. A vista of possibilities opened up to me.

What happened when you ventured away from Realism, I wondered? How did it affect the historical veracity? Was it an ethical strategy, a way to represent the Holocaust without eclipsing history? Or was it problematic? If so, what were the problems?

I felt a little fizz of excitement as I hunted through my bookshelf. Over the next couple of years I read and considered many books that employed fantastic narrative strategies, but I chose to write on three: Yaffa Eliach's Hasidic Tales of the Holocaust, Jonathan Safran Foer's Everything is Illuminated, and John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.

In that first draft, Molly wasn't reading Holocaust literature. She wasn't writing Gienia's story. The two women's stories wove between one another, each throwing the other into sharper relief. But they never met. They never really even grazed each other. There was no obvious, tangible connection between them. The structure was insanely complex (insane for a first-time novelist anyway) and had tonal shifts that were difficult to manage — from the tragic-comic tone in Molly's sections to the stripped back dissociative prose of Gienia's section (which mimics the tone of Holocaust testimonies). I turned my attention to that organic, ‘poetic’ structure and tried to find the logic in it.

Molly's story unfolds more or less chronologically, over a short space oftime, whereas Gienia's is told out oforder, fragments from a time span covering a period of years. Gienia's fragments emerge from Molly's emotional states, rather than running alongside Molly's completely separately, or sutured with obvious thematic material. Molly's first person sections are immediate, expressionistic and colloquial; Gienia's third person sections are at a distance, and are sombre and spare. My supervisor Nick had pointed out that the two sections had different vocabularies. He noticed this when the word ‘scuttled’ appeared in both: ‘Until here, you keep the vocabularies completely different. It should stay that way,’ he said. It should? Why? I didn't know yet. What was the effect of it? It illustrated their separation. There must be more to it than that. It felt like they'd been written by two different people.

I wrote a first draft of the exegesis in two weeks and sent it off to Nick. It sounds easy — but the pre-writing had lasted for four agonising years. And it was only a irst draft. I fully expected months of painful redrafting; I'd watched enough of my fellow PhD candidates sweat blood through the final weeks of their PhDs to know what was ahead of me. What I hadn't expected was how useful writing the exegesis would be. It clarified my thinking. On the page, contained in a 20,000 word essay, some problems which had seemed insurmountable suddenly looked manageable. A few solutions seemed laughably easy.

For instance, the concept of subtlety was a farce. Why would you want to be subtle? To hide the fact that you don't know what you're doing. The answer was like being punched it the gut. It was true. I was trying to fool everyone into thinking I knew what I was doing, and I didn't. This was why nothing worked, because I couldn't answer the question ‘why’. Not for Molly, and not for me. And perhaps I wouldn't be able to before the PhD was due. I launched into a sixth and final draft of the novel, making it clearer that Molly was writing Gienia's story.

At the end of January I went to see Nick. Unbelievably, he had minimal notes on the exegesis. I needed to add a chapter here, unpack a few points there, and define my terms more thoroughly.